Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan by Rajiv Chandrasekaran

Strategic muddle, infighting between the Allies, on-the-ground blunders: the story of Obama’s surge in Afghanistan makes chastening reading

A lost cause? General McChrystal, above, called Afghanistan a bleeding ulcer (Omar Sobhani )

P
osterity will puzzle over why the leaders of America and Britain, even before
­disengaging from the shambles they had created in Iraq, convinced
themselves that they could make up for this by ­scoring a win in
Afghanistan. In 2009, Barack Obama and his advisers were ­initially
sceptical when Nato commander General Stan McChrystal proposed a troop
“surge” there, but the newish ­president signed up anyway.

Some 40,000 additional American troops were committed, for 18 months only.
Heaven knows why this should have impressed the Taliban, who do not do
limited-season runs. Some 17,000 of the reinforcements were US marines, who
went to Helmand province rather than the strategically more important
Kandahar. They understood their mission as being to pick up the pieces left
by the blundering Brits, who had got in over their necks there.

This book tells the story of what ­followed. It is written by Washington Post
correspondent